Since 1985, in various formats, SLANT -- an independent voice based in Richmond's Fan District -- has offered its readers original commentary on politics and popular culture, including cartoons and selected sundries. Warning: Sometimes that means satirical content. All rights are reserved.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Too Many Secrets

Camelot
at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave lasted 1,036 days. For the children in school
on Nov. 22, 1963, the murder of President John F. Kennedy was stunning
in a way nothing has been since.

On
Nov. 24, 1963 a live national television audience witnessed the murder
of the assassination’s prime suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald. There was no
doubt that Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub operator, was the trigger-man.
What made him do it is still being questioned.

Moynihan,
who was an Assistant Secretary of Labor then, famously replied, “Heavens, Mary,
we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.”

The cynicism spawned by the cloaked-in-secrecy
aftermath of the JFK assassination has tinted everything baby
boomers have seen since that November. Everything.

However, I’m not at all convinced there had to have been a
complicated conspiracy to kill the president and cover up the tracks.
After he was dead, just because some people deliberately obscured
related information, we don't necessarily know why they did it. In some cases it was
probably people trying to cover asses, hither and yon, for a myriad of reasons.
On the other hand, I’m not saying there was no
conspiracy that led up to the murder of President Kennedy.

We
don't know and now it appears we'll never know. The much-ballyhooed
release of assassination-related papers with secrets that have been
locked away from public scrutiny for over 50 years has been put on hold
... until April, 2018. Good luck.

For
this piece I’m skipping past the argument over whether
Oswald acted alone. Not going to speculate about whether Oswald was a
dupe, or one of the greatest marksman who ever lived. The point to this
screed is that the secrecy that
rushed in to obscure what happened in November of 1963 poisoned the
American culture in a way that we need to recognize, so we can learn
from it today.

Tomorrow we ought to do something about it. Official secrets open doors to conspiracy theories. Withholding the truth invites liars to fill the void with what serves their agenda.

The
President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known
as the Warren Commission, published its report on Sept. 24, 1964:
Oswald was found to have been a lone wolf assassin. Which immediately
unleashed the questioning of the Commission’s findings. Was its famous
“single bullet theory,” which had one projectile traveling circuitously
through two victims, great sleuthing?

Or was it an unbelievable reach?

*

In
1965 gunmen murdered Malcolm X in an auditorium in Manhattan. Three
years later Martin Luther King was killed on a motel balcony in Memphis
by a sniper. Two months after that assassination, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was
gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel.

Unfortunately, the
official stories on those three shootings were widely disbelieved, too.
In the ‘60s more public scrutiny of how those assassination probes were
conducted might have led to different conclusions. More importantly, even if more sunlight
into those probes failed to produce different outcomes, at least
Americans might have felt better about the good faith of the processes.

Instead,
it seemed then the authorities generally believed the citizenry didn't
really have a right to see the whole truth, and nothing-but-the-truth.
Too often it seems to have been decided on high that the public was better off not knowing some
things, as if we were all children.

Of course, such secrecy can hide
everyday malfeasance, as well. Shielding the citizenry
from such information is the sort of thinking that went with world
wars, with spies lucking about. In the 1960s the
public expected its government to routinely withhold all sorts
of
secrets.

At long last, it took the rudest of revelations to snap many Americans out of blithely
tolerating an over-abundance of secrecy:

The My Lai Massacre horrors.

The publishing of the Pentagon Papers.

The Watergate Scandal hearings.

The Iran-Contra Scandal hearings.

The bogus justification for invading Iraq.

As those events paraded by, America steadily morphed into a
nation of cynics.
Now, those of us who recognize the damage that's been done by official
lies know better. We know we were wrong to ever have accepted such skullduggery in the
name of keeping America safe.

Today, to trust official conclusions, we need to see into the
investigations. That means more public hearings. In the age of Trumpism, for democracy to
have a chance of working properly, we need to know whose money is behind
this or that politician. We, the people, can’t allow the fundraising
and sausage-making to continue to be done in the dark.

Moreover,
in 2017, Americans have no privacy. Our government(s) and plenty of
large corporations already know mostly all they want to know about us. They
monitor our moves as a matter of course. With calls for more security getting louder that's not going to change. Still, don't we need more scrutiny of our elected leaders' moves?

*

In 1997 Sen. Moynihan’s book, “Secrecy: The American Experience,” was published. In the opening chapter he wrote:

In
the United States, secrecy is an institution of the administrative
state that developed during the great conflicts of the twentieth
century. It is distinctive primarily in that it is all but unexamined.
There is a formidable literature on regulation of the public mode,
virtually none on secrecy. Rather, there is a considerable literature,
but it is mostly secret. Indeed, the modes of secrecy remain for the
most part -- well, secret.

On inquiry there are regularities: patterns
that fit well enough with what we have learned about other forms of
regulation. But there has been so little inquiry that the actors
involved seem hardly to know the set roles they play. Most important,
they seem never to know the damage they can do. This is something more
than inconveniencing to the citizen. At times, in the name of national
security, secrecy has put that very security in harm's way.

Fifty-four
years after the murder that we
baby boomers can still feel in our guts, it’s high time to stop
tolerating unnecessary secrecy in government at all levels. Sunlight
could discourage more of the same. Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote:

"Publicity
is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases.
Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the
most efficient policeman."

1 comment:

If Moynihan was alive today, he wouldn't recognize his own party. Just saying. And there were #WMDs in Iraq. https://www.facebook.com/notes/joe-kidd/for-the-record-wmds-were-there/761840163828541/

PS- I'll try to check back. From the looks of it, we may disagree about things but I appreciate your blog. Found my way here from your '06 post on Vin Scully not wanting to call the game where (a tainted) Barry Bonds would pass the REAL home run king, Hank Aaron ;) Anyway, take care!